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“Very good. Well, Judith. Got to get going. Got a few sick people to see.” (His inveterate farewell. Satire? Helping Mum feel others had it worse? Simply a statement of his to-do list?)

This time, Coralie pursued Dr. Ainslie down the corridor.

He couldn’t be further from her idea of a venerated, superhuman cancer surgeon.

With his strange orthopedic loafers or slippers and tufty gray hair sticking out of his ears, he looked like an old-age pensioner off to place a few bets on the dogs.

“How will you decide if you’ll do the operation?

Are you waiting for her to get stronger? ”

“Every day she’s getting weaker,” Dr. Ainslie said. “If it happens, it’ll be soon.”

“And when will you know?”

“Tomorrow. Scan.”

···

It was Friday. In the morning, she used the fourteen-day free trial of a VPN to tune in to the UK news.

Surely there was no hope Labour could win outright.

Yet Adam had told her about the legal experts the party had assembled and briefed—the meeting rooms (even the catering) prebooked for long days of coalition negotiations.

It was still possible for Labour to end up the biggest party and Ed Miliband the next PM.

The stirring music of the BBC’s election coverage blared out from her laptop.

She felt a sudden homesickness for London, watching the high-speed footage of the city by night: the Thames, Parliament, the tower of Big Ben, all lit up.

In four minutes, David Dimbleby said, he could reveal the contents of his envelope, the results of the BBC’s exit poll: “Tantalizing.”

“Exit pohle,” Dan mimicked.

“Exit powl,” Coralie said in her flattest, broadest Australian accent.

“If neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband can command a majority on their own, is there going to be a place for the Liberal Democrats at the cabinet table?” Dimbleby wondered. “Or for Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP? Or Nigel Farage and UKIP?”

“Dickhead,” Dan said.

Big Ben chimed. “Here it is, ten o’clock.

” Dimbleby turned to a giant screen. On it, David Cameron looked like a sock puppet with googly eyes, or a boiled egg with a face drawn on.

“And we are saying the Conservatives are the largest party. And here are the figures which we have. Quite remarkable, this exit poll. The Conservatives on 316. That’s up nine…

Ed Miliband, for Labour: seventy-seven behind him at 239. ”

“Okay.” Coralie shut her laptop. “Fuck you too.”

···

When they got into hospital later that morning, the room looked different. The blinds were still down, and the sheets were in disarray. Their mum was not in the bed. The door to her bathroom was slid across, closed. Jerome, the stocky nurse from the Philippines, came in with a trolley. “Morning.”

“Morning, Jerome,” Dan said.

At the bed, Jerome whipped off the disposable protective undersheet and quickly put on a new one. Coralie lowered her voice as quiet as it could get. “Did she have a bad night?”

“Listen, she was running to the bathroom that fast….” He shook his head. “She can’t run, okay? No matter what. I will clear up any accident. Any! But I can’t fix a broken hip. Okay? No running.”

“We’ll tell her,” Dan said. “Thanks, Jerome.”

“She’s a lovely lady.”

“You’re a very good man.”

Jerome nodded on his way out. “Safety first.”

The door to the bathroom slid open and their mum crept through. She was a skeleton, so small her cotton gown had been sent over from the children’s ward. There was a murderer inside her mum’s body.

“Hi, Mum.” Coralie put on an upbeat voice. “What time’s your boyfriend coming to see you?”

“Dr. Ainslie,” Dan translated.

“Natasha’s taking me to the scan,” their mum whispered. “Pop down to the nurse’s desk and tell her I’m ready to go.”

Without the presence of their mum and the pressure to be cheerful for her, the room seemed more scary, and the situation more bleak. Coralie opened the blinds.

“It’s so fucked up.” Dan frowned, his eyes welling.

Coralie remembered how, when he was young, he’d cried so much, and so passionately, tears had almost bounced off his cheeks.

Their father had told him that if he wanted to cry like that, he could do it in someone else’s house.

Once, when they’d lived in Canberra, they’d lost him—five-year-old Dan.

He’d gone to cry at the neighbors’. “Have you told Dad about all this?”

“I haven’t spoken to him,” Dan said. “Have you?”

“No! Has Mum?”

“I doubt it.”

···

A little while after the scan, there was a gentle tap at the door. Dr. Ainslie shuffled in. “And how’s Judith?”

Before Coralie could say she was asleep, a soft voice piped up from the bed. “I’m okay.”

“Had a bad night?”

“A bit.”

They were talking so quietly Coralie had to inch forward. “Scan looked good,” Dr. Ainslie murmured. “Less distended.”

He had said if it looked good, he’d do the op. Here he was, seeming to say it looked good. Coralie cleared her throat, a loud sound in the quiet room. “So that’s good?”

“It’s all doing what it’s meant to down there. Moving around. No, she’s doing well.”

“What does that mean for the surgery?”

“I’m inclined to leave it. Operation…Complex, isn’t it? Might work. Might be worse. Not saying we might not do it. But yes, no—not now.”

None of that made sense, but his watery-eyed frown made one thing crystal clear: Coralie had overstepped. A miasma of ambiguity swirled around her mother’s condition and care, and that was the way it had to be. It had been the height of bad manners for her to seek to bring in facts.

Dr. Ainslie shuffled out.

“Parking’s running low. I might just move the car.” Dan left too.

“Mum?” Coralie said. “Are you disappointed?” ( In me? she might have added.)

Judith Bower turned her face to the wall and drew up her thin legs like a Pompeii victim. “I’m not thinking very much.”

It seemed to be the limit of her talking too.

Whenever it was that they were supposed to cry, to love, to say what they meant to say—that time had passed. It had probably been decades ago, maybe in childhood, maybe when Coralie had been born.

···

In 2004, Coralie’s father had been posted to Iraq.

It had been a fairly major role in operations to support the Coalition forces.

There had been a few profiles of him in the right-wing newspapers, a source of keen embarrassment for her.

It was a shock when, a year later, straight off the plane from Baghdad, he’d moved into a serviced apartment in Canberra, just as Mum and Dan were loyally waiting for him back home in Darwin, Dan with an elaborate homemade banner featuring a kangaroo fighting an upright crocodile, both in red boxing gloves, and a speech bubble saying Welcome Back Dad .

“Probably lucky he didn’t see it,” Dan said.

“I was just asking to be called a homo.” (At seventeen, he wasn’t out at school, or to Roger, who greeted the rare same-sex couples in his orbit with a chilly “In some parts of Indonesia, you’d get a hundred lashes for that. ”)

The mystery had been solved when Coralie had seen photos of Roger on Facebook with his younger (though not young) girlfriend, Jenny, a Chinese Australian single mother who was high up in Australia Post. Their mother stayed in the big family home in Fannie Bay until Dan finished Year 12.

At that point, letters from Dad’s solicitors forced her to move on.

She could have gone anywhere—back to Hobart, where she’d grown up, or to any of the fourteen places and bases her husband had dragged her over the course of his career.

But her mother had been in Jakarta and then Darwin since 1996.

It would have been hard to get used to the tropics, harder still to leave them behind.

She decamped ten minutes up the road to Nightcliff.

When, a decade ago, Coralie had first seen her mother’s new house, she’d thought it was nothing special.

Now, after so long in London, she could easily grasp its appeal.

Made of dark wood, it was up on stilts in case of flooding and so the Volvo could be parked underneath.

The garden grew thick with tall trees and jungle.

The scent of frangipani filled the air. Tiny finches flitted around, in and out of the louvered windows.

Cockatoos strutted along the balcony, overlooking the eroding dingo-colored coastline and the light gray seas of Beagle Gulf.

Deceptively calm on the surface, the waters teemed with deadly jellyfish and saltwater crocs.

But inside, her mother’s interiors had the charm of a suburban bookkeeper’s office or a law firm.

The bottom shelf of her main bookcase held a row of files labeled, in her neat handwriting, Will and Legal, Warranties, Bank, Car, Identity, Bills.

The top shelf was home to a plastic fern, two elephants carved from a smooth beige stone, and a plate of ceramic tropical fruit.

The absence of utility or beauty in the ornaments was so poignant that Coralie had to despise them so they wouldn’t break her heart.

Some of her mother’s personality, or at least personal history, was evident in the bamboo furnishings (cushions covered with batik fabric) and, on the wall, a trio of Balinese masks.

The television was distressingly large, the choice of a lonely person.

It would have upset their mother to no end to see what her living room looked like after weeks of her children camping in it.

When she’d first arrived, Dan had kindly given Coralie the “spare room” (his room) with its large single bed.

Now that there was no hope of their mother returning home anytime soon, it seemed right to reconsider the arrangement.

The afternoon of the unpleasantly ambiguous operation verdict, they opened the door to their mother’s bedroom and (with a visceral sense of trespass) went inside.